Presidential run politics. What politics?

With the new deficit deal being a parallel of Bohner's and planned cuts in cost of living increases for Social Security in effect in 2015 why doesn't Obama declare allegiance to Clintonian politics and put his representation of democratic politics to rest? The rightist upswing in Europe and the United States being the straw that broke their camel's back pushing them to excuses for a behavior that is less than contemptible. Obama in a Maryland town hall belittles socialism and decried it, claiming rightly that he has nothing to do with it.He spoke of the countless emails and letters he received from Social Security recipients who can't eat by the end of the month. His solution? They need to pull together and sacrifice for the greater good, he suggests, as his deal now doesn't even include his declared tax increases for jet skiers anymore. So what if the recipients can't eat for a week, instead of a couple of days, while he and Bill sit pretty, and no adequate and reasoned tax revenue is generated? Why did the voters choose another pseudo democrat for president who now has staff members of his say that the democratic base is no threat to his re-election? Why should we have to suffer what he claims to be minor increases in borrowing which we can ill afford? Why should those who are fighting in Afghanistan worry about their paychecks when the wealthier do not, and nothing is asked of them. We live in fear of them, of their not creating new jobs. We live in fear of Tea partiers. We need a real fighter who knows that government spending creates jobs in trying times, not tax breaks. That helping those who need help is not an option. That asking someone who has nothing to sacrifice is obscene.

Protecting Democracy

How extremely crass is it to frivolously resolve all those recent deaths in Norway with a maximum 21 year sentence, even in the event of a Neo-Nazi terrorist attack?
Or consider non menacing the murderer's rantings about bomb construction and final journal entries as done by a leader of the Anti Racist movement in Norway?
Or just be obtuse enough not to understand veiled threats or denials or shocked accusations of Nazi behavior by Nazis in times of democracy?
How is mourning the loss of many enough,or more than a palliative for not realizing that those lives are erased from the flow of existence forever?
How is it not shortsighted not to realize that it is not becoming the enemy to effectively impede events such as these from occurring again, or for that matter, how shallow and absurd is it not to realize that not all crimes are the same and that one needs to positively, completely stop a person and groups capable of acting with such violence and in such aberration to commonly held humanity?
How is a passive condescension to violence on this scale an effective defense for the protection of democracy and peace?
How credulous, plain or feigning stupid can Merkel be in stating that coexisting in peace in a democracy is the rule of law when one party conceals directives of violence, inhumanity and prevarication? For that matter how can she state, along with Sarkozy, that multiculturalism is dead without revealing at least a confused understanding as to who is truly multicultural and who is not, but just a person bearing ill will for the society that accepted him or her as an immigrant or of the society bearing ill will for its immigrants? Isn't blanketing every immigrant with this understanding of multicultural just saying that every immigrant is a destructive element to a society that accepts him or her? Or that a society is inflexible and inherently fascistic?
How is it not opportune to stop the spread of this inhumanity now that it is relatively contained not much more effective at saving lives than the possible development of a full scale war?
The death of even one person is never quantifiable, but preventable. It's an immense tragedy when this fails. With this recent upswing of fascistic populism in Europe, why wasn't the camp properly secure? Why did it take the police 40 minutes to reach the camp? And isn't it a proof of inhumanity of the mass murderer that he thought of misrepresenting a police officer, whose function is to save lives, just to trick those who believed him into death?

Abbottabad

There's much criticizing of the modum operandi of anti-fundamentalist terrorist tactics that governmental agencies are using.I always thought it sloppy to state that an agency is an enemy of civil liberties because of a case's problematics, and I found it admirable that analyses through magazines and journals would alert us to possible irregularities that were operational in an agency. We are not a perfect society, but we are a society whether we like it or not, and our enemies are much more so aware of this than us. I don't see the advantage in trying to find utopia elsewhere: you'll still be part of us, for good and for bad. And there are bad historical periods which we survive by the skin of our teeth, or serene ones in which we progress toward justice and equality for all. My first impact in dealing with Bin Laden and Abbottabad was the increased traffic in women children and senior Muslims wearing traditional garb on public transportation, on lines they were not known for taking, with attitudes ranging from insulting New Yorkers to an older man spitting on a bus. The women were too passively serene, almost waiting for a reaction. And this in support of someone who encouraged the cold blooded murder of thousands on 9/11 and was responsible for the deaths on many more in the war that ensued and more terrorist attacks. And this in New York City. Think of how those in charge of defending us are to react. Think of how those defending civil liberties or who claim to do so should react to defend us as well. Moreso, think of what having an enemy means, or what the human spirit is capable of in good or evil. Not to do so would be a serious injustice to those who rely on your capacity of leadership or judgment. How is Bradley Manning being served by an organization that sees the United States military as an imperialist tool? There was talk that Manning, who allegedly released confidential material to wikileaks, wanted reform. What did he see in the branch of the military he was in? Was corruption, private interest, a divergence in our sustaining values of equality and justice present? And after the leak had been made reporting that a courier had been spotted in Abbottabad, how wise was it of Obama to endanger the life of Navy Seals in a potentially dangerous situation. One doesn't die for one's country, one lives for one's country, and those responsible for the lives of millions should know precisely that their responsibility is to keep life breathing. And better to print about the courier and Abbottabad: once a leak of these dimensions is out, it better be out so that those involved prima facie know what they are facing and don't risk their lives. Maybe that's why Panetta was chatting about someone being spotted somewhere, or at least I hope so.

Ai Wei Wei

Remember Ai Wei Wei's ordeal from artist disliked by the Chinese government to artist arrested for tax evasion? He's invited to Berlin University for a post as visiting lecturer but can't probably make it because he's to remain in China for a year. He still sees himself as an artist persecuted, and so did the Guggenheim, which led in efforts to liberate him after the world had been notified of his arrest, based on freedom of expression, they thought. While his backpacks seemed poignant in memorializing the death of Chinese schoolchildren in an earthquake that could have had a lesser number of victims if school structures had been safer, where does his new sculpure get its inspiration (see it in New York, by the Plaza Hotel): it's the severed heads of the Chinese astrological signs, floating on their dripping blood as stands. What cut the heads off-the French revolution? Does it commemorate the figures as celebratory of a time birth determined fortune and character, happier times than one in which self worth and personal accomplishment, or better, social justice, determines a life's outcome? Why mourn their loss? I'd celebrate it without getting so graphic about it.

Why Israel?

From a basically uninformed person about the Middle East conflict, such as myself, it seems mighty peculiar that all leftists, including Israeli leftists, have gathered to oppose a recent law banning boycotts of Israel, including economic, when they are verbal against embargos against other countries, which amount to the same thing. And why shouldn't the situation in Israel take into account its own historical peculiarities: nobody ever contended the borders of Cuba, even the Kennedy administration with its Bay of Pigs madness, while Lebanon is with Israel on the maritime level, but nobody rushes to arms against that fact: for that matter nobody from the veneered human rights watches or the U.N.has even mentioned Shalit, the Israeli soldier still hostage to Hamas, and it's been going on for five years while now Fatah and Al Quaeda sympathizers Hamas are allies for the creation of a state that was a colonialist fiction in prima facie? And the horror,in creating a situation in which Shalit is understood as a person who must sacrifice himself for whatever reason, instead of people everywhere, especially from the left, fighting for his right to be freed and helped. How can anyone not realize that Israel is at war against whoever shells it and what's so odd about that? No one argued after Pearl Harbor, and I'd like to see who would argue that World War Two was an unecessary war. How are those who deny your own very existence any better, let alone afflicted as they are by intense anti-Jewish hatred? Again, to a person who doesn't dwell like Alice Walker does on "occupied territories" the question seems simple: it all amounts to cumulative anti-Jewish hatred to me. So, if it means I'm not the sweetheart of a left who supports Bill Moyers (sponsor of Joseph Campbell, a Nazi sympathizer)where Jews are a plutocratic lot and easily a right who holocaust denies at best, who cares. It just sends both points of view and politics straight to hell.

What it means to be American.

There's nothing like watching a European newscaster narrate the end of the shuttle program with a smile from ear to ear to make you feel like an American.

While the Paris group is remanding all decisions on a no flight zone to the United Nations in the future, Gheddafi threatened to ally with Al Quaeda and is busy bombing now more hospitals and murdering the rebels. Didn't the dictator say that it was the rebels who were doing Al Quaeda's interests in Libia?

50 lives are being sacrificed to the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Technicians there, trying to prevent more damage, have already absorbed radiation that will lead to cancer. President Obama claims new U.S. investments in nuclear energy are secure, Sarcozy says investments in nuclear energy can't be immediately stopped and Italy says it's ready to reinvest in the field.

Bradley Manning has been kept in solitary for the past 7 months and now is held nude based on false suicide alert claims. One of the documents he allegedly leaked to Wikileaks was a video of an Apache helicopter murdering civilians and two Reuters journalists. He is being accused of having turned the documents over to "enemies of the state", a charge which results in execution.

Michael Moore warns about Michigan's Governor Snyder, who in just two months has:

'Gotten the House and Senate to pass bills giving him "Emergency Management" powers such as the ability to appoint a corporation or a CEO who could literally dissolve town governments or school boards, fire the elected officials, nullify any local law and run your local governmental entity.The company would then have the power to declare all collective bargaining null and void.

Proposed giving business a whopping 86% tax cut while raising personal taxes by 31%! And much of that tax he believes should be shouldered by-I kid you not-senior citizens and the poor! He says these two groups have not been "sharing the sacrifice"the rest of us have been burdened with. So his budget proposes a 1.8 billion tax CUT for business and a 1.75 tax INCREASE for the rest of us, most of it from the poor, seniors and working people- even though the top 1% in Michigan ALREADY pay a lower state tax rate than anyone else does!

Together with the legislature,introduced over 40 anti-labor bills in just the first two months of this session!'

How is it that now, when Italy is worried about clandestine immigration, and France is dillydallying, Hilary Clinton is saying that in Afghanistan the fundamentalists were from Cirenaica,and who would we help really? Cirenaica is the region of the revolters and on many interviews Libians have stated that there are no fundamentalists in Libia.

Would you have expected John Galliano and Julian Assange partners?

The first caught in drunken antisemitic slurs and a crush on Hitler, and, because of it, fired from Dior, the latter trying to create Jewish conspiracies because one of his Russian collaborators is a holocaust denier?

More cuts in the 5-year spending freeze plan by the Obama administration.

Here are some, as detailed in the New York Times:
"air-traffic control, national parks and cancer research"
"more than one billion from airport grants and nearly one billion from grabts to states for water treatment plants and similar projects. Public health and forestry programs would also be cut"

from "Obama's budget seeks deep cuts in domestic spending"

In order to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 28% by 2020, the Obama administration thinks that clean energy means to build smaller transportable modular nuclear reactors for the use of utility companies.

Sarah Palin, aid for the poor and the battle against racial discrimination.

She tops herself, as usual, by criticizing President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society legislation, which includes Medicare, Medicaid, environmental laws, educational television,arts and humanities:

"Regan saw the dangers of LBJ's Great Society.He refused to sit down and be silent as our liberties were eroded by an out-of-control centralized government that overtaxed and overreached in utter disregard of constitutional limits"

However venomous this comment is, it disregards the fact that taxation was reduced, along with poverty: Americans living below the poverty line was reduced from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, and of African Americans from 55 percent to 27 percent.

The current call on more civility in government by Republicans is being heeded. There is talk of ice-cream breaks, pauses in the agenda for telephone calls to mom, and to the moms of their democratic opponents, to exchange recipees and discuss the weather. Now Republicans can no longer aim paper airplanes at democrats in congress, or try to distract the same with pin up showgirl calendars, nor can they interfere with their travel by deflating tires or cancelling flights. There is talk of a memo reminding all Republicans to greet their fellow Democrats in elevators with a "how are you?" before launching into any recrimination and requesting them to donate to a local charity to feed the homeless. In case of a refusal,the memo provides the number for major newspapers and local and national media.

Pope John Paul, to be beatified on May 1, did pray for forgiveness for crimes against Jews, women, heretics and minorities, but not against the working class.

What was Sarah Palin thinking when she used crosshairs?

Birthright citizenship is a hot topic these days,especially for people like Daryl Metcalfe, a Republican from Pennsylvania wanting to bring an end to "the immigrant invasion". So far, they've gathered together to declare the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States at a loss for American citizenship, not establishing which citizenship they should acquire. Thus barring United States citizenship, all others are available by wish and volition: Principality of Monaco's, Lichtenstein's, Azerbajani,Ugandan, even, why not, Martian or Venusian since the decision,at the moment of birth, is obviously up for grabs. Astrological signs may play a part in the decision making process. In case the citizenship is determined by the parents', those from two different countries will have ambiguous choices made for them, again, as long as it isn't U.S.'

New decision: end of life care consultation with doctors for annual check-up won't be payable by Medicare any longer. It was seen as too controversial for Republicans.